The Makers: hobbyists are going to beat the industrial giants

This article was taken from the October 2012
issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in
print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of
additional content by subscribing online.

The great inventor/businessmen of
the industrial revolution, such as James Watt and Matthew Boulton
of steam-engine fame, were not just smart, they were also
privileged. Most were either born into the ruling class or lucky
enough to be apprenticed to one of the elite. For most of history
since then, entrepreneurship has meant either setting up a corner
grocery shop or some other sort of modest local business, or, more
rarely, a total pie-in-the-sky crapshoot around an idea that was
more likely to bring ruination than riches.

Today, we are spoilt by the easy
pickings of the web. Any kid with an idea and a laptop can create
the seeds of a world-changing company -- just look at Mark
Zuckerberg and Facebook or any one of thousands of other web
startups hoping to follow his path. Sure, they may fail, but the
cost is measured in overdue credit-card payments, not lifelong
disgrace and a pauper's prison.

The beauty of the web is that it
democratised both the tools of invention and of production. Anyone
with an idea for a service can turn it into a product with some
software code . These days it hardly even requires much programming
skill, and what you need you can learn online -- no patent
required. Then, with a keystroke, you can "ship it" to a global
market of billions of people.

Maybe lots of people will notice and like it or maybe
they won't. Maybe there will be a business model attached or maybe
there won't. Maybe riches lie at the end of this rainbow, or maybe
they don't. But the point is that the path from "inventor" to
"entrepreneur" is so foreshortened it hardly exists at all any
more.

Indeed, startup factories such as Y Combinator now coin
entrepreneurs first and ideas later. Their "startup schools" admit
smart young people on the basis of little more than a PowerPoint
presentation. Once admitted, the would-be entrepreneurs are given
spending money, whiteboards and desk space and told to dream up
something worth funding in three weeks.

Most do, which says as much about the web's
ankle-high barriers to entry as it does about the genius of the
participants. Over the past six years, Y Combinator has funded 300
such companies, with such names as Loopt, Wufoo, Xobni, Heroku,
Heyzap and Bump. Incredibly, some of them (such as Dropbox, reddit and Airbnb) are now worth billions
of dollars.

But that is the world of bits, those
elemental units of the digital world. The web age has liberated
bits; they are cheaply created and travel cheaply, too. This is
fantastic; the weightless economics of bits has reshaped everything
from culture to economics. It is perhaps the defining
characteristic of the 21st century (I've written a couple books on
that, too). Bits have changed the world.

We, however, live mostly in the world of atoms, also
known as the Real World of Places and Stuff. As huge as information
industries have become, they're still a sideshow in the world
economy. To put a ballpark figure on it, the digital economy,
broadly defined, represents $20 trillion (£13 trillion) of
revenues, according to Citi-bank and Oxford Economics. The economy beyond
the web, by the same estimate, is about $130 trillion (£84
trillion). In short, the world of atoms is at least five times
larger than the world of bits.

We've seen what the web's model of democratised
innovation has done to spur entrepreneurship and economic growth.
Just imagine what a similar model could do in the larger economy of
real stuff. More to the point, there's no need to imagine -- it's
already starting to happen. There are thousands of entrepreneurs
emerging today from the maker movement who are industrialising the DIY spirit.

In the web age, the DIY punk movement's co-opting of
the means of production turned into normal people using desktop
publishing, then websites, then blogs and now social media.
Indie-pressed vinyl became YouTube music videos. Four-track tape
recorders became Pro Tools and iPad music apps. Garage bands became
Apple's GarageBand.

The digital revolution has now reached the workshop,
the lair of Real Stuff, and there it may have its greatest impact
yet. Not just the workshops themselves, but more through what can
be done in the physical world by regular people with extraordinary
tools.

We are all makers. We are born
makers (just watch a child's fascination with drawing, blocks,
Lego, or crafts) and many of us retain that love in our hobbies and
passions. These projects represent the ideas and dreams of
millions of people. Most never leave the home, and that's probably
no bad thing. But one of the most profound shifts of the web age is
that there is a new default of sharing online. If you do something,
video it. If you video something, post it. If you post something,
promote it to your friends. Projects, shared online, become
inspiration for others and opportunities for collaboration.
Individual makers, globally connected this way, become a movement.
Millions of DIYers, once working alone, suddenly start working
together.

Thus ideas, shared, turn into bigger
ideas. Projects, shared, become group projects and more ambitious
than any one person would attempt alone. And those projects can
become the seeds of products, movements, even industries. The
simple act of "making in public" can become the engine of
innovation, even if that was not the intent. It is simply what
ideas do: spread when shared.

We've seen this play out on the web
many times. The first generation of Silicon Valley giants got their
start in a garage, but they took decades to get big. Now companies
start in dorm rooms and get big before their founders can graduate.
You know why: computers amplify human potential; they not only give
people the power to create but can also spread their ideas quickly,
creating communities, markets, even movements.

Now the same is happening with
physical stuff. Despite our fascination with screens, we still live
in the real world. It's the food we eat, the clothes we wear and
the cars we drive. Our cities and gardens; our offices and our
backyards. That's all atoms, not bits.

This construction -- "atoms" vs
"bits" -- has its derivations in the work of a number of thinkers
from the MIT Media Lab,
starting with its founder, Nicholas Negroponte, and today most
prominently with Neil Gershenfeld and the MIT Center for Bits and
Atoms. It is shorthand for the distinction between software and
hardware, or information technology and Everything Else. Today the
two are increasingly blurring as more everyday objects contain
electronics and are connected to other objects, the so-called
"Internet of Things". That's part of what we'll be talking about
here. But even more so, we'll look at how it's changing
manufacturing, otherwise known as the Engine of the World
Economy.

Comments

"just look at Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook "

Great example. Zuckerberg and FB are just as ethical as sweatshop. Among all the tens of thousands of businesses you had to pick the worst one. What's next? Startups in the Nazi Berlin? Saddam and the social networking?